Invisible Men

Baseball has always been more than just a sport to the American people. For many, it is a way of life, teaching not just brute skills but life lessons and morals. In the wake of World War I, racism and bigotry abounded in the United States. Even though the integration of schools had recently been instated, Jim Crow laws severely limited the activity of African Americans in society, resulting in baseball teams being limited to whites. Jackie Robinson made an important step in gaining rights for African Americans when he broke the color barrier of baseball in 1947. He did this by making civil rights his ambition even before the protests began (Coombs 117). Jackie Robinson’s fame as a baseball player and determination to defeat adversity

This book is about the Negro baseball league and the freedoms as well as the sorrows that it afforded the Negro league players who participated in the sport. This book speaks of all the popular Negro league players that not only shaped the game of baseball but America as a society. It also gives the readers first hand account of the hardships that black people faced in the early 1900s.There were so many unsung hero's that paved the way for Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball and this book tells their forgotten story.

In Buck O’Neil’s book, I Was Right on Time, he mentions a phrase that was common for Negro League ball players to hear back in the day. O’Neil writes, “John McGraw said he’d give 50,000 dollars for Donaldson if he’d been white…we heard that a lot about a lot of players through the years” (O’Neil 78). But unfortunately for many of the ballplayers at that time, they weren’t white. And as a result of their skin color and the Jim Crow laws of the time, African American, including ballplayers like Buck O’Neil, had to endure troubling times and unjust hardships. On the surface, I Was Right on Time is a memoir, a story about O’Neil’s time spent navigating through black baseball and his stories of some of the greatest to play the game, but underneath the tales of a great American sport, is a great American travesty; a real look into the days of segregation and the harshness of racial problems in 20th century America.

Negro baseball leagues have a deep historical significance. Racism and “Jim Crow” laws encouraged segregation of African-Americans and whites. Arguably, the players on the negro baseball leagues were some of the best ever. Even today they are still being recognized and honored for their wonderful contribution to baseball as a whole. It started when major league owners had made a “gentleman’s agreement” to keep blacks from playing in the game. The barrier that went up was finally broken with a few black players being signed into white teams in the 1940s. It was once said by Martin Luther King Jr., “[Segregation] gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, it gives the segregated a false sense of inferiority.” While that is true of

     "Over the decades, African American teams played 445-recorded games against white teams, winning sixty-one percent of them." (Conrads, pg.8) The Negro Leagues were an alternative baseball group for African American baseball player that were denied the right to play with the white baseball payers in the Major League Baseball Association. In 1920, the first African American League was formed, and that paved the way for numerous African American innovation and movements. Fences, and Jackie Robinson: The Biography, raises consciousness about the baseball players that have been overlooked, and the struggle they had to endure simply because of their color.

As baseball grew, so did the African American ambitions to play against other white teams. Moses “Fleetwood” Walker,

But, Peterson didn’t only have a love for the game of baseball, but had a love for writing. After he had graduated from Upsala College, this love he had for writing lead him to work for many newspapers in Suffern, New York, Titusville, Pennsylvania, and Elyria, Ohio before joining the World-Telegram and Sun in 1962. But, in 1966, the paper closed and because of that event, he turned to freelance writing and set out to learn the history of the Negro Leagues. By interviewing the star players of the Negro Leagues and studying the plays of the players through microfilms. Peterson was inspired to try out for the Brooklyn Dodgers when he was nearly 30 but, these try-outs were unsuccessful for him as a player, and so he returned to writing newspaper

The game of baseball evolved immensely during the 1900’s. There were new rules and rule changes, new teams in new states, and then there was Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson was a true legend from the day he was born in 1919. Baseball had it all in the first half of the 1900’s, fans filled the stadiums day after day, even during the war times. There was a big-name player on almost every team, children and adults admired these professional baseball players. The only thing professional baseball didn’t have during these times were African American players. Learning about the hardships that he had to overcome as a young boy, and the accomplishments he made from his college days at UCLA, to becoming the first African American professional baseball player, Jackie made it known that he was an American hero.

The story of Jackie Robinson has become one of America's most iconic and inspiring stories. Since 1947, American history has portrayed Jackie Robinson as a hero, and he has been idolized as a role model to the African American baseball community. It is an unarguable fact that he was the first to tear down the color barriers within professional baseball. The topic of Robinson’s role in integration has long been a point of discussion amongst baseball historians. Researchers have accumulated thousands of accredited documents and interviews with friends and team mates such as short stop, Pee Wee Reese, and team owner, Branch Rickey. However, few journalists have asked why Robinson was selected and what was Branch

Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby were very determined to stick with the game they loved and to make a change. Thanks to their performance both on and off the ball field, “other owners began to seek talented black players, and by 1952, there were 150 black players in organized baseball” (Branch). Their “actions had repercussions far beyond the sports world” (Jim). The integration of baseball was an enormous smack in the face to all of segregation. Many racial barriers quickly tumbled down with the integration of baseball; restaurants, hotels, and stores removed their “white only” signs bringing blacks and whites together. Robinson and Doby could not have won the battle against segregation on their own, the press helped to make their struggle to be known throughout the country.

In the biography Jackie Robinson and the American Dilemma by John R. M. Wilson, it tells the story of racial injustice done after world war II and explains how Jackie Robinson was pioneer of better race relations in the United States. The obstacles Jackie Robinson overcame were amazing, he had the responsibility to convert the institutions, customs, and attitudes that had defined race relations in the United States. Seldom has history ever placed so much of a strain on one person. I am addressing the importance of Jackie Robinson’s trials and triumphs to American racial dynamics in the post war period to show how Robinson was a prominent figure in the civil rights movement and brought baseball fans together regardless of race.

Since the abolition of slavery in the USA in 1883 and through the first half of the 20th Century, African Americans had been in a constant struggle to try and gain an equal footing in society. Like many aspects of American life, black sportsmen were segregated, and no African American had played professional baseball since 1884. For this reason, the integration of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African American to play Major League baseball in the modern era had a grand impact on the entire country. From the moment that Dodgers owner, Branch Rickey decided that Robinson would break the colour lone, the history of sport and the history of African Americans would not be the same again. The importance of his integration and the effect it had on civil rights can be looked at in many different ways. It had great effect on the African American community, instilling pride and belief once again in the American Dream for many who had once thought it impossible. It also had significant importance for civil rights groups, and brought about a figure who would fight his peoples quest for equal rights until the day he died. It was a significant risk taken by both Rickey and Robinson, professionally and personally. But it was a risk that both in the short term for African American sport, and in the long run for African American civil rights, was ultimately well worth taking.

This article is about the declination of blacks in the game of baseball. It begins by talking about how successful blacks were in baseball from 1981-1997. Blacks such as Tony Gwynn, Tim Raines, and Gary Sheffield were winning National League Batting Titles 16 out of those 17 years. From 1998-2004, only one black player has won the batting title. As a huge baseball fan, I never knew that stat and find it very interesting. The article also entails that black players had won the National League MVP award quite often from 1949-1970. More recently from 1985-2004, black players had won the MVP 11 times, with Barry Bonds winning 6 of the 11. The

The Negro Leagues, baseball leagues for merely black players, allowed urban communities to “pass down the tradition of ‘their’ game 25.” As the Negro leagues ended, baseball’s popularity diminished because it no longer acted as a unique and individualized aspect of African-American culture. The Negro Leagues and the black baseball movement inspired hope as a part of the larger civil rights movement of the 20th century and the black community utilized baseball “as a means of collective identity and civic pride 26.” African- American’s racial advances in baseball signaled the long term success of the larger civil rights movement of the 20th century. As a result, baseball became essential in identifying the progress and identity of African-American culture. Baseball lost its social prevalence after the African-American civil rights movement due to the emergence of other

This comparison and contrast study will define the similar elements of non-fiction baseball history and contrasting aspects of comedy and tragedy in The Boys of Summer by Roger Khan and Ball Four by Jim Bouton. In Khan’s book, The Boys of Summer, the history of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the post-WWII era and up until the 1955 World Series. This book provides an example of the non-fiction genre, since Roger was a well-known sports journalist in the game of major league baseball. Most importantly, the victory of the Dodgers over the new York Yankees in the 1955 World Series is a major highlight of the book, which reveals a personal triumph for Khan and other Dodgers fans during this historical period. The presence of Jackie Robinson provides an important historical example of the racial integration policies in the context of the World Series: “Robinson was competent, but uninspired in the World Series, by which time another Negro had begun to